Many debates have occurred online regarding Social Media within Education, since its presence has become strongly desired within our daily lives, focusing conversations on integrating Social Media within the classroom as a subject, but what about using Social Media for Education?

YouTube has taken the initiative to just that, creating the ability for the Education system to utilize its site to better educate globally by redefining the way we learn through visualization. YouTube has created YouTube for Schools, a controlled environment that enables teachers and students to capitalize on watching educational videos designed for the classroom.

This is an innovative opportunity, granting schools the prospect to revolutionize the way children learn, since people learn in different ways, some more so visually; this is an opportunity to expand the classroom and open doors for students to access a worldly library, literally.

How Can My School Participate in YouTube for Schools?

A school must sign-up to YouTube for Schools in order to have access to this exclusive community on YouTube that will not only enhance the education system but also keep it safe, secure and appropriate for the classroom.

4 Benefits of Signing-up with YouTube for Schools

Comprehensive Content – YouTube will provide educational videos of the highest standard, accessing from YouTube EDU, TED, Stanford, PBS as well as many others.

School Appropriate – School Admins and Teachers will be able to have a login to watch any video, students however will login and only have access to YouTube EDU and videos that their school has added. All comments and other types of videos are disabled, only granting access to YouTube EDU.

Customizable – School Admins and Teachers are able to customize the videos through the YouTube EDU library, even as much as creating customized playlists for their students to watch.

Teacher-friendly – Teachers will have access to playlists of videos that are in ordinance with common educational standards organized by subjects and grade levels. The playlists were created by teachers so more time is focused on teaching instead of searching.

The way we communicated has changed in the past decade; we are using technology as a platform to remain connected with people we know and to expand our relationships and connections with various like-minded people. YouTube for Schools further enhances the connection by offering an opportunity to better our education systems through videos and by unraveling an innovative form for students to better their education by learning more, by stepping outside the most likely dated textbook, unto a worldly stage of endless video opportunities.

Read More Social Media News and Information on the Hasai Blog

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Erin Ryan is a Social Media Specialist, Social Media Promotional Director and Writer. She has a keen understanding of Social Media and frequently stays up-to-date within the Industry. Erin Ryan has the know how for B2B, B2C and personal Social Media to assist in making it successful.

She can be found on a variety of social networks and enjoys sharing quality information and knowledge that will help aid you in finding your own genuine success. Connect with Erin on Twitter!

American Idol is not the all-knowing portal to success like the television show makes it out to be. In fact, the people ‘training’ budding musicians at the camp aren’t teaching much about music production at all. What they are doing is working on creating an army of identically manufactured and perfectly packaged robots which they can hopefully later sell to the many sheeple that populate the earth. On top of that, they’re making music production schools look like a waste of time and money. Here’s how:

Image is King

Image is the most important thing to American Idol when it comes to judging contestants, and that’s a fact. More often than not, a less than ‘perfect’ physical appearance will receive criticisms — even when the voice is phenomenal. Simon Cowell has repeatedly told fat contestants that they should lose weight to be successful, implying that their incredibly talented voices aren’t enough to carry their (over)weight. Others are criticized for poor fashion choices, accessory choices such as piercings or hair color, and age especially — if you aren’t under 25, you can’t get on the show at all. At American Idol camp, aspiring singers will not only be vocally trained — but physically. Although image does matter and the most popular celebrities are usually photoshopped to appear more beautiful than they already are, music production is not a reflection of physical appearance. Artists like Sean Kingston, Die Antwoord (talking about the dude here, not the girl), and ODB are all modern examples of people who have become highly successful in the music industry despite their fatness/ugliness.

Manufacturing a Product

Image is king because American Idol is manufacturing a product. This product does not necessarily mean bestowing young hopefuls with knowledge of music production which they may actually use to create hits with, but coaching people to become more of what Idol thinks is the ‘ideal American’. This means:

- Making proper fashion choices: whether it’s goth, punk, athletic tomboy, beauty queen or country boy, there’s a mainstream version of it all. You can be punk, but not too punk; the outfit has to be perfectly put together and perfectly punk.

- Weight: the weight thing is so important because while judges are criticizing contestants for being overweight, hundreds of thousands of people (specifically teenagers and kids) are watching the show and learning that success means looking good all the time. This has absolutely nothing to do with actual music production.

- Performance and charisma: while charisma and putting on a good performance are vital to a person who wants to be a performer, voice training is ultimately the most important to music production. Or is it?

American Idol is Fake

There’s a long, long list of American Idol controversies which point to how fake it is. On the end of just about every season, there’s been some big voting controversy where audiences are forced to look at American Idol with a skeptical eye. Thousands of votes get lost, or sometimes redirected to a singer that the caller did not wish to vote for. Phone scams pop up and convince people to call fake or fee-charging numbers. There’s also a current rumor that Simon Cowell has cheated on Britain’s Got Talent by ushering in a kid he’s known for years — and who knows if that’s happened once or more on Idol. American Idol is not a real show, and it does not produce real musicians. It pumps out the same doll again and again, much like a factory. And much like a toy company, the dolls come with customizable personalities. Need a country doll? A black one? An asian one? An R&B or pop doll? They’ve got it for you. Also, much of the show is completely staged.

American Idol Winners Lip Sync

Contributing to the show’s utter nonsense content is the fact that the Idol singers lip sync. Performers at the Idol Camp aren’t necessarily taught to sing well — but definitely to fake it well. Recently, American Idol winner Scotty McCreery was riding atop a Thanksgiving Day Parade float, waiting to sing a song to the crowd. The only problem was that the music and the singing started — but Scotty hadn’t. His voice flowed through the speakers while his lips were unmoving and a dumbfounded expression crossed his face. Scotty realized the mistake within seconds and began lip-syncing along. It seems that the show which produces real artists who go on to a fulfilling career in music production is really just promoting fraudulence, showing us that anyone can be an American Idol. All you need is autotune and someone to hit play at the right time.

Anyone is Allowed In

Anyone is allowed into American Idol Camp. This was proven when Alex Attardo showed up to perform Proud Mary, claiming that he had attended the camp years back. He obviously learned little to nothing about the production actual music , because his performance was atrocious. But hey, maybe they were only teaching lip syncing that Summer.

It’s unfair to think that the doors should be closed to the talentless, but we live in an unfair world. If American Idol Camp truly cared about producing successful and well-rounded artists, they would focus energy on kids who are actually good at singing. Wasting time with kids who obviously don’t have a career in that field isn’t doing anyone any good. It’s great that the kid likes to sing, but Idol Camp is supposed to be preening these kids for a career — and leading on those who cant deliver is almost an act of cruelty. Attardo was incredibly disappointed when the judges turned him down, but that could be part of the shows rampant fake-tasticness as well. All in all, Idol Camp is the last place you want to send your kid if you really want him or her to get started in the world of music production.

If you have not visited Stumbleupon in a while, you may be surprised at its newest redesign, making the site visually enhanced from changing category links to images, increasing image thumbnails on  profiles (not to mention completely redoing the profile layout) and adding channel pages for celebrities, publications and brands now have authorization to create accounts on the site.

Stumbleupon has even gone so far to change its logo, yes that is right, gone are the blue, white and green design and replacing the well-known circle is an orange circle with SU in white letters. Not exactly, what Stumblers are use to, but is a better representation of the brand as well as modernizing the site says CEO of Stumbleupon, Garrett Camp:

“We realized we weren’t conveying the experience well enough through our visual appearance. The power of our technology is remarkable, but now we’re finally doing justice to that with a modern, slick front-end. Finally, our front-end is as good as our back-end.” (via Gigaom)

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Profiles look completely different and now enable you to choose under the new “Your Likes” feature what you want to see when visiting your profile from “showing all”, “show photos only”, “show videos only”, “show additions” to “show by interests only”. The entire profile looks cleaner and fresher with a more humanized feel and look.

What are StumbleUpon Channels?

This is probably the most exciting change to StumbleUpon due to its previous lack of abilities for businesses, since users had to create accounts with names. As many Social Networking sites enable brands now to create a page on behalf of their business, it seems changing the look and adding features to StumbleUpon is the right move. Channel pages will also serve a purpose for publications and celebrities that use StumbleUpon, but arguably will be most beneficial for companies to have the ability to become a part of the Stumbling community, since it is the #1 traffic-driving website. This means a huge shift in opportunity to discover and share content that will aid in Brand Marketing and deliver phenomenal page view impressions.

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With that said, brands should be aware that StumbleUpon enjoys a variety of content from an array of domains. This means that creating a “channel” and subbing only your link repeatedly will not be much of a benefit to your business, instead discovering content that is relevant to your industry and mixing it up with your content is your best bet for success.

The unveiling of the new look is rolling out as we speak and is now beginning to show at the top of accounts to “check out the new Stumbleupon”.  Keep in mind that this latest redesign is web based only for now, so mobile goers will have to wait to view it from their hand-held devices. It will also be interesting to see how the new logo will catch on within its community and in amongst the cyberculture, since many have SU buttons to share, clearly they will need to be updated as well.

This is definitely a bold move on Stumbleupon’s behalf, and we are looking forward to what is in store for the future of this amazing site.

Do you like StumbleUpon’s New Features and logo?

Read more Social Media News on the Hasai Blog.

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Erin Ryan is a Social Media Specialist, Social Media Promotional Director and writer. She has a keen understanding of Social Media and frequently stays up-to-date within the Industry. Erin Ryan has the know how for B2B, B2C and personal Social Media to assist in making it successful.

She can be found on a variety of social networks and enjoys sharing quality information and knowledge that will help aid you in finding your own genuine success. Connect with Erin on Twitter!

But as time grew closer, I felt a bit nervous. Healthcare, with all its privacy issues and the malpractice minefield, is a totally different animal in a lot of ways, not least of all in social media.

The conference was the Annual Meeting of ASTRO – American Society for Radiation Oncology – and held in my old stomping grounds of South Florida. On my panel would be Matt, to discuss how he has been using social media and what he’s learned; Amy Grantham, a cancer survivor who found a wonderful, supportive community on Tumblr; and Ted Lawrence, who’s not only an MD, but also a lawyer and would discuss the very real legal minefield that is social media when you’re a healthcare professional.

I thought I’d share my talk with you (I went first, so you don’t have to wait long to hear what I have to say) in this mp3:

Social Media and Medicine

And here’s my PowerPoint presentation, which you can use to follow along:

What makes up a good one? What makes them atrocious?

These questions are tackled by our friends at BuySellAds as they look at what works and what doesn’t work. Click to enlarge.

Whether it was intended as such or simply a bi-product that the company had over its association with the Jersey Shore star, Abercrombie & Fitch scored major marketing points with consumers and the media when it declared it was attempting to pay Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino to NOT wear their clothes on air.

It’s made national news on the internet and television. Even if the offer is 7-digits, it’s been better publicity than any marketing campaign could ever get. Twitter and Facebook have been blowing up about it for 2 days and it has become both a rallying call for the many haters of the MTV show as well as a beacon for conversation about the clothing line itself.

What can businesses learn from this? Exposure is no longer about endorsements alone. Getting a celebrity to say something good about your brand is fine, but in this ever-connected society, endorsements aren’t what they used to be. Buzz is everything. Attaching to celebrities and current events often ends poorly. In this case, it has been an absolute win.

Trying to take advantage of trends or memes on the internet is often the biggest mistake that brands can make when they dive into social media as a marketing or engagement platform. They see a funny lolcat or attack to the wrong Twitter hashtag, mess around with the content a little, and think they’ve created viral gold.

In most cases, they end up embarrassing their company or making people mad for the attempt.

There are ways to do it. “Going viral” isn’t as hard as most believe. The first and easiest step is to appeal to the empathic nature of people and social media in general. Below, Chris Menning at Buzzfeed gives us a very straight-forward overview of how and why empathizing is the key to going viral, whether for marketing or simply to gain exposure.

File it under, “Duh”, but the older people are, the less likely they are to look at mobile advertising when it’s presented to them. Even kids aged 13-17 are only look at the ads 68% of the time with the majority of them claiming to “sometimes look at it.”

On the surface, this may seem like a criticism against the effectiveness of mobile advertising. On the contrary, it’s an extremely encouraging study that BuySellAds did. The numbers may be much lower than those in other mediums, but don’t forget about cost. In most cases, mobile advertising is dramatically cheaper than traditional means. As a result, having over 40% of mobile users under 45 looking at mobile advertising sometimes means that people are starting to see what’s going on with their iPhones and Galaxy tabs.

Check out the entire infographic.

Today’s variation truly struck me. It’s not that the cause was necessarily great, and that’s the point. Instead of helping someone find their stolen computer or sending 90th birthday wishes by the bushels, Reddit user throwawayinging sent tens of thousands of views (maybe more) to a random kid teaching others how to play D on the clarinet. The kid had never had more than a few views on his videos. When he wakes up in the morning, he’s in for a big surprise.

Currently, the standard 300 views are being displayed. YouTube holds views beyond 300 until they are verified, but with nearly 2500 thumbs up on the video, it’s clear that there are tons of views on the 1:17-long video. Here it is:

This section of the graphic focuses on the age and sex of the users. Click it to see the whole infographic.